I like to consider myself something resembling an adult. I pay my taxes. I know how to drive an automobile. I can preheat an oven without any supervision. And yet, when it comes to cinematic representation of human flatulence, I find myself giggling like a kid in the back row during fourth-period social studies.

Funnier even than the sound of the expelled gas vibrating its way past buttock flesh is any sort of detailed discussion of the gastrointestinal wind’s contours or qualities. If it can be assumed that the effluvium is particularly malodorous, and if someone is confined in a space with no access to outside ventilation, as is the case with poor Rob Riggle who finds himself on the business end of both Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’s rectum during a scene in Dumb and Dumber To, well, you can just forget about it. No clever satirist, regardless of their verbal dexterity, can ever hope to best such a thing in terms of pure laughs.

Don’t get me wrong – I take no pride in this confession. But my mind’s got a mind of its own, and I’d be lying if I said this movie didn’t crack me up on more than a few occasions.

Dumb and Dumber To is remarkably true to the original – down to the cheap sets and half-assed plot. It takes a while to get rolling, but once Harry (Jeff Daniels) and Lloyd (Jim Carrey) hit the road for another absurd caper, it’s wall-to-wall buffoonery. The twin numbskulls bumble their way from Rhode Island to El Paso (named for the bean dip!) to try and find Harry’s long-lost daughter. You see, Harry needs a kidney transplant or he’s gonna die. (I told you this was hilarious!) The daughter was put up for adoption by Harry’s ex-flame (a very brusque Kathleen Turner) and raised by a science genius who is up for an award at the “Ken Conference” (clearly modelled on the TED Conference but, as you may or may not know, Ks are funny.) Our heroes have to get there, and also save the day from baddies giving chase to steal “a billion-dollar idea” from the stepfather inventor. And if I spend any more time detailing this ridiculous plot then, truly, the joke’s on me.

Harry and Lloyd charge into each social encounter like bulls in a china shop. Keeping matters fresh is the wide spectrum to their styles of idiocy. Sometimes one is clearly dumber than the other. Sometimes they are angry put-down artists. Then they swiftly pivot into full-blown morons, drinking embalming fluid believing it to be a slushie. Daniels gets most of his laughs from being loud and clumsy, but Jim Carrey is still a rubberfaced marvel. The Farrelly Brothers realise that they’ve got gold on their hands and are extremely generous to him. One sequence is just a collection of Carrey mugging in close-up until his off-screen scene partner (foil Rob Riggle) ultimately interjects and asks: “What are you doing?” No answer proper answer is given, and the film just picks up where it left off.

In one champion moment, Carrey squeezes laughs from simply eating a hot dog in a weird way, even if there’s no real motivation for the behaviour. The move involves loading the dog with mustard, biting the edges from outside the bun, then chomping a little of the bun, then sliding the rest of the tube down past pursed lips, then using the remainder of the bun as a napkin to get the mustard off his face, then tossing the bun away. It’s an outstanding bit of unexpected physical comedy and Charlie Chaplin himself couldn’t do much better.

None of this is to say that Dumb and Dumber To isn’t what you’d typically call a good movie. The movie cracks nonstop jokes and plenty of them just die on the screen. There’s no shortage of callbacks to the first film, some of which work better than others.

The picture lasts an hour and 50 minutes but it feels like three days. It is annoying and exhausting, and I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not this is part of the Farrellys’ twisted design. During one ceaseless sequence I actually muttered: “Ugh, I can’t take any more!” and my colleague seated beside me chuckled in agreement. We were laughing, but by God did we want to get out of there.